Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden (10 March 1957-1 May 2011) was a wealthy Saudi Arabian Islamist ideologue who, along with the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, founded al-Qaeda in 1988 while fighting in the Soviet-Afghan War. Bin Laden called for terrorist attacks against the West and nations perceived as enemies of Islam or western puppets, with his most audacious act being the 9/11 attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, claiming nearly 3,000 lives. He was then subjected to a worldwide manhunt by the US and its allies, who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and captured or killed many of his supporters. On 1 May 2011, he was located in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan by SEAL Team Six and killed in Operation Neptune Spear.

Biography
Osama bin Laden was born into a wealthy Sunni Muslim family in Saudi Arabia. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he helped found the Afghan Services Bureau, recruiting, financing, and arming volunteers to fight in the mujahideen guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation forces. When the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, bin Laden created the al-Qaeda ("the base") terrorist network to promote war on a global scale. His enemies were the Jews and Israel, the United States and its allies, Shi'ite Muslim "heretics", and most governments in the Muslim world, condemned for betraying true Islam. In 198, he proclaimed that "killing the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country."

A Hunted Man
After al-Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 the Americans tried to track down bin Laden to arrest or assassinate him. He found refuge in Afghanistan, where his fighters supported the seizure of power by the militant Islamist Taliban movement. With its skillfully coordinated use of four hijacked airliners to attack New Yrk's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, causing almost 3,000 deaths, al-Qaeda's 9/11 onslaught in 2001 brought bin Laden to the center of world attention. The United States' response to this was to attack Afghanistan, but bin Laden avoided capture. He would ultimately be located in a compound at Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed in a raid by the elite SEAL Team Six in 2011.